Trade called to back War Child campaign

Activision has called on the games industry to get behind its GAME For Good Modern Warfare 2 charity push.

The firm is trying to encourage a million Modern Warfare 2 owners onto Xbox Live this weekend (Saturday December 5th and Sunday December 6th). A huge flux of online players will trigger a payout from the publisher of up to 250,000 for War Child. The more gamers online the more money the publisher will pledge to charity.

Our motivation has always been to share the commercial success we were confident in achieving with MW2 and to give something back to a charitable cause directly connected with the effects of war,” said Activision UK's marketing director David Tyler.

The whole team here at Activision has been incredibly motivated to pull this campaign off and make it a massive success. We hope that the whole games industry will respond and rally around this initiative to help support War Child.

We believe that one million MW2 players on Xbox Live during the course of the weekend is a stretching, but achievable objective.”

Activision has teamed up with GAME and Xbox for a heavy-duty marketing campaign to support the initiative. The campaign will take in TV, online and print activity.

Meanwhile gamers can also buy GAME For Good wristbands in-store at GAME.

The campaign will be unmissable in the run up to launch weekend,” added Tyler.

We really are pulling out all the stops to maximise the donation amount to War Child, help them drive awareness for their work and get people very excited once again at the prospect of MW2 doing something interesting so soon after a massive launch.

The GAME for Good programme constitutes the largest single investment we have ever made on the Call of Duty business in the UK outside of the direct launch period,” Tyler said. Our total investment is on a par with our launch week for MW2 and the majority of 18 to 40-year-olds who are in the UK in early December will know what GAME for Good is all about.”